Where to List Your Business Online and Why It Matters for Local SEO

Where to List Your Business Online and Why It Matters for Local SEO

Just how important is local SEO for small businesses with a physical location? According to a recent study, 78% of local searches on mobile and 61% of local searches on laptops result in offline purchases.

So what exactly are these people searching “locally” for? Here’s a breakdown of the top tasks that consumers perform when searching locally:

Searching for address/location

Finding a business with desired product/service

Searching for a phone number

Finding out hours of operation

Getting driving directions

Discovering coupons/special offers

Reading ratings and reviews

If any or all of those above tasks apply to your small business, then you’ll undoubtedly want to pay attention to local SEO and make sure your business is covered when consumers are on-the-go or doing their research. Previously, I wrote a post that was intended as a primer on getting started with local SEO and all the different components that you need to pay attention to.

In this post, I’ll be getting into the nitty-gritty of what some consider to be at the core of local SEO, creating, double-checking, and optimizing local citations across the multitude of local business listing channels out there.

Let’s take a deep breath in and dive right into it.

Critical Local Business Listing Attributes

As a small business with a physical location, implementing local SEO best-practices may be just as or in some cases more important than traditional or broader SEO approaches. For example, have a look at the image below which highlights results from a study that captured eye-tracking data to determine that end users gravitate towards Google Places listings over organic listing:

Now, let’s have a look at what a citation is, why is it so important, and why they’re going to be the core of your local SEO strategy.

According to local SEO expert David Mihm, citations make up roughly 25% of the top twenty factors in his annual Local Search Ranking Factors. Additionally, during one of his presentations, he showcased the following visual breakdown of local ranking factors, but not without a disclaimer that they were based solely on his opinion.

In case you’re still confused about what a local citation is, as I mentioned in my previous post, a citation is simply put, a “mention” of your business name on webpages other than your own, followed by your address, phone number, or both, regardless of whether there is a link to your website or not.

An example of a citation might be an online directory, like Yellow Pages, where your business is listed but not necessarily linked to.

Now another term you’ll hear thrown around quite often in association with citations is the acronym NAP, which stats for name, address, and phone. However, there are other key items for consideration which includes photos, videos, and perhaps most importantly proper categorization.

Let’s take a more in-depth look into the the top four main factors for when you’re creating a listing:

1) Business Name

Your business name, otherwise known as your business title, is arguably one of the most important factors for ranking well in local search engine results. The key here being that above all you have to make sure that your title remains 100% consistent across every single data source on the web, it’ll help establish trust in your existence and location tremendously.

For example, if you decide to call yourself “Anne’s Apparel Shop” in one listing and “Anne’s Fitness Apparel Shop” in another, there’s a big chance that Google as well as other search engines view them as two separate businesses when indexing your business.

For extra measures, here’s are the following provisions outlined by the Google Quality Guidelines for Local Businesses which go as follows:

Your title should reflect your business’s real-world title.

In addition to your business’s real-world title, you may include a single descriptor that helps customers locate your business or understand what your business offers.

Examples of acceptable titles with descriptors (in italics for demonstration purposes) are “Starbucks Downtown” or “Joe’s Pizza Restaurant”. Examples that would not be accepted would be “#1 Seattle Plumbing”, “Joe’s Pizza Best Delivery” or “Joe’s Pizza Restaurant Dallas”.

If you happen to be an aspiring business owner just finalizing your name, it’ll help to really do somekeyword research a head of time to get the perfect and “most optimized” name down.

2) Physical Address

The biggest thing to remember with NAP is consistency, consistency, and you guessed it, more consistency. Why does this matter for your physical address? Let’s look at an example:

Well, guess what? Because of the meticulous and detail-oriented nature of search engines, they’re going to consider all three listings as different businesses, which will ultimately lower their overall confidence and negatively impact your rankings.

Another factor to keep in mind is your actual physical location, as Google factors in how close or far your location is from the actual city center happens to be. Hypothetically, let’s say you’re a chiropractor, if your office is located near Google’s idea of your city center, you have a better than of showing up for searches that involve location-based keyword searches like “Denver chiropractor” or “chiropractor is Denver;” especially when compared to other chiropractor offices located further away from the city centre.

3) Phone Number

The same note about the importance of consistency applies equally to phone numbers, especially on the web. If search engines find several different phone numbers for your business location, you can be sure it will trigger red flags with their algorithms.

This also applies if you’re in the habit of using several phone numbers for the sake of “call tracking,” SEO experts recommend strongly against their use, if you’re already running a campaign, they also suggest creating the number as an image as opposed to indexable HTML text.

When you proceed to create a local listing for your business in search engines, you’ll be asked to pick 2-10 categories that best describe your business, which search engines then use to serve up results relating to keywords to users. Improper or absent categorization will severely impair your ability to rank for local keyword searches.

So, how do you go about optimizing category names? SEO expert Chris Smith has an in-depth blog post dedicated to help you do just that. Some of his top recommendations include:

Do keyword research to discover common industry names consumers may be using to find companies like yours.

Use Google Sets to discover search terms that Google considers to be semantically associated with category names you’ve already chosen.

Don’t restrict yourself to only broad category names

Next up, let’s look at where exactly to create online listings and citations for your business.

Where to Get Citations

Alright, so that we’ve covered why citations are the foundation or cornerstone of any effective local SEO campaign, it’s time to cover where exactly you should list your business for maximum impact. Here’s a list with examples to get you started:

Make sure to have your NAP listed on all your social profiles. (Pro Tip: use the service knowem to snag your name for all major social networks and web services)

To find the top blogs in your local region, go to Google and search for “[your city] blog” to get the best candidates, as since they show up at the top of the serp, they’ll be well-indexed by search engines

4) Local Directories & Newspapers

Search for either “[your city] + business listings” or “[your city] + directory” to get results, and be sure to get on your city’s Chamber of Commerce website.

The Best Local Citations for Your Business

To help you better understand what the best local citation is for your business by category and city, Moz Local teamed up with whitespark (a citation search tool) to come up with an impressive number of resources with helping you be on target. I highly recommend checking out:

Options for Managing Your Citations

When it comes the actual implementation of your local SEO campaign, you have generally three options:

Do-it-yourself

Pay for subscription software

Pay an SEO agency

Obviously, you’ll have to account for things like the size of your small business and most importantly your budget when you make your decision, but below I break down these three popular choices so that you can make an informed choice.

Doing-It-Yourself Approach

The best post I’ve found on DIY citation building has to be Casey Meraz’s “Finding and Building Citations Like an Agency” on the Moz blog. Not only does he do a great job of breaking down his recommended approach which I’ll mention below, but he also provides a great citation building template for you to get your hands dirty with and start your local SEO campaign.

The essence of his approach are the following three steps process called Check, Fix, Add, outlined below:

Check to see if the listing is there

If the listing is there, make sure the NAP is 100% accurate. If not, fix it!

If the listing does not exist, add it

Another neat hack he outlines which I think requires mentioning is the use of a tool called Roboform and it’s feature called Form Filler which can help you automatically fill out the time-consuming forms for each of the platforms where you’re looking to list and build citations.

Using Software to Do It

Here are the top software options you can subscribe to help you manage your citations: